The music industry has seen its fair share of feuds over the years… KRS-One vs. MC Shan… LL Cool J vs. Kool Moe Dee… Biggie vs. Tupac… Britney Spears vs. herself… It’s a veritable Hatfields and McCoys situation every time you turn on your radio! But all of those musical feuds pale in comparison to the still-ongoing cultural feud between Pirates and Ninjas. I don’t know about you, but I would much rather have been caught in the crossfire of the East vs. West feud of the late-’90s then find myself facing down the ship-sinking cannonballs and razor-sharp shurikens of these sea-faring scalliwags and mysterious martial-arts masters. A no-less-dangerous feud may be brewing as we speak though, this time at the instigation of independent music artists, pitting the metallic mayhem of robots against the furious fur and fangs of wolves!
My devotion to robots has been well-documented in this space, so I needn’t elucidate the matter any further here. But don’t assume that my infatuation with androids automatically puts me in their corner should a feud break out. They do have a lot of musical muscle behind them though, what with so many songs having been written about them, and having their own dance. The latest group of musicians to dedicate a song to these maniacal mechanoids is the Music Has Evolved crew, made up of DJ and beatmaker Gaslamp Killer and Sumach the Gonjasufi. The tune, simply titled “Robots,” is a reverb-heavy, fuzz-bass and chicken-scratch guitar-laden slab of Psychedelic Funk that warns mankind against creating robots, citing his folly and comparing racism to the Mac vs. PC debate, while calling to mind the Beastie Boys instrumentally and proto-Electronica Psyche-Folk band Lothar and the Hand People’s forgotten ’60s tune “Machines” lyrically. The track is available on Dublab’s Echo Expansion tour EP.
Listen to “Robots”
Though they may not have as heavy a discography as robots, wolves have a surprising amount of support among the music industry as well. Just look at all the bands with “wolf” in their names! Washington D.C.-based Le Loup is one of them, even if they did disguise it by saying it in French instead of English. Not only did they name their band “The Wolf,” their new album The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly features a track called “We are Gods! We are Wolves!” for good measure. What’s really kind of freaky is that it’s the kind of song I’d normally refer to as “robot music,” coming off like the Postal Service if Ben Gibbard became fascinated with pseudo-religious apocalyptic imagery while Jimmy Tamborello pledged his allegiance to the “Diwali riddim.” I’m actually not sure whether I should chalk the tune up as a point for wolves, a point for robots, or a point for the completely unrelated practice of autodeism which is probably more awesome than robots or wolves combined!
Listen to “We are Gods! We are Wolves!”
No cybernetic humanoids or creatures of the lupine persuasion were harmed during the writing of this post.
-El Keter
